Fonts and font/point/line size

Everything in a figure needs to be readable

• Text
• Labels
• Lines
• Colors and gradients

Adjusting fonts

• By default R uses Helvetica
• Be careful with fonts
• extrafont: older, focus on local fonts
• showtext: newer, more flexible
  • Load Google fonts directly

Adding fonts

library(showtext)
font_add_google("Titan One", "titan")

# Use showtext automatically
showtext_auto()

ggplot(tibble(x = rnorm(1e3)), aes(x)) + geom_density() +
  labs(title = "Fancy font title") +
  theme(text = element_text(family = "titan"))

Local fonts

• Use full local path to font file
• Provide italic, bold, and bolditalic if needed.

font_add(family = "times",
         regular = "/System/Library/Fonts/Supplemental/Times New Roman.ttf")

ggplot(tibble(x = rnorm(1e3)), aes(x)) + geom_density() +
  labs(title = "Fancy font title") +
  theme(text = element_text(family = "times"))

Adjusting font sizes

• Use theme(axis.text...), etc. one by one
• Use cowplot::theme_cowplot(font_size = X) to get pretty close
  • Options to change font face and relative sizes of axis labels, etc.

ggplot(tibble(x = rnorm(1e3)), aes(x)) + geom_density() +
  theme_cowplot(font_size = 10, font_family = "mono")

Manuscipt font size

• font_size of 8 or 10 might be fine for manuscript figures
• Figures will look terrible in RStudio plot preview
• Save to file, open, print
  • Repeat
  • Set up a reusable figure theme

Slide font size

• font_size of 20, 24, or larger might be necessary for slide figures
• Figures will look terrible in RStudio plot preview
• Save to file (jpg/png) at expected output size
  • Draw a box in powerpoint and get dimensions

Slide font size

Slide font size

ggplot(tibble(x = rnorm(1e3)), aes(x)) + geom_density() +
  theme_cowplot(font_size = 24, font_family = "serif")

Adjusting point and line size

• Same as for font sizes
  • Export, print/import, check
  • Repeat